Current Projects

(Please see my CV for a complete list)

Publications

This paper explores the consequences of the 420 US drone strikes in Pakistan from 2006 to 2016. Our identification strategy exploits wind conditions that complicate the feasibility of drone strikes. We find drone strikes encourage terrorism, causing 17.5 percent of all terror attacks in Pakistan and up to 6,000 terror deaths. Distinguishing between reactions of outsiders (the Pakistani populace) and insiders (terrorists), we analyze (i) the sentiment of US-related coverage in a leading Pakistani newspaper, (ii) anti-US protests, and (iii) Google searches indicative of radicalization. Our findings suggest outsiders turn against the US and sympathize with insiders because of drone strikes.  ​

This paper first introduces a theoretical formalization connecting a polity's income level to terrorism. Our framework can accommodate different underlying assumptions about individual- and society-level grievances, yielding competing hypotheses. We then construct a panel database to study terrorism for 1,527 subnational regions in 75 countries between 1970 and 2014. Results consistently imply an inverted U-shape that remains robust to incorporating a comprehensive set of region-level covariates, region- and time-fixed effects, as well as estimating an array of alternative specifications. The threat of terrorism systematically rises as low-income polities become richer, peaking at GDP/capita levels of approximately US $12,800 (in constant 2005 PPP US $), but then falls consistently above that level. This pattern emerges for domestic and transnational terrorism alike. While peaks differ by perpetrator ideology, the inverted U shape also prevails across ideology-specific subsamples. In sum, alleviating poverty may first exacerbate terrorism, contrary to much of the proposed recipes advocated since 9/11.

Despite colossal economic and human losses caused by conflict and violence, designing effective policies to avoid conflict remains challenging. While the literature has proposed a voluminous set of candidate predictors, their robustness is questionable and model uncertainty masks the true drivers of conflicts and wars. Considering a comprehensive set of 34 potential determinants in 175 post-Cold-War countries, we employ stochastic search variable selection (SSVS) to sort through all 234 possible models to address model uncertainty. We find past conflict constitutes the most powerful predictor of current conflict: Path dependency matters. Also, larger shares of Jewish, Muslim, or Christian citizens are associated with increased conflict, while economic and political factors remain less relevant than colonial origin and religion. Our results help future researchers and policymakers by inching toward causality and providing a standard set of covariates that need to be accounted for in designing any relevant policies.

By facilitating the flow of information in society, communications technology (CT; e.g., newspapers, radio, television, the internet) can help terrorists to (i) spread their message, (ii) recruit followers, and (iii) coordinate among group members. However, CT also facilitates monitoring and arresting terrorists. This paper formulates the hypothesis that a society's level of CT is systematically related to terrorism. We introduce a simple theoretical framework, suggesting that terrorism first becomes more attractive with a rise in CT, but then decreases, following an inverted U-shape. Accessing data for 199 countries from 1970-2014, we find evidence consistent with these predictions: Terrorism peaks at intermediate ranges of CT and corresponding magnitudes are sizeable. Our estimations control for a range of potentially confounding factors, as well as country- and year-fixed effects. Results are robust to a battery of alternative specifications and placebo regressions. We find no evidence of a potential reporting bias explaining our findings.

Work in Progress

Madrassas in Pakistan come into the limelight in discussions around radicalization and extremism. It is reiterated in such discussions that the pedagogical practices in madrassas are dated and tend to snub the critical thinking abilities of the students. In short, graduates of madrassas are portrayed as “denizens of an alien world” (Rahman, 2004) who hold skills and world views that differentiate them from the rest of society. Against this backdrop, the present study explores the attitudes of madrassa students in dimensions that affect the larger society. Specifically, we measure the responses of madrassa students to questions that allow them to express their views on gender stereotypes and discrimination, moral values, political ideologies and preferences for various entities, religiosity, and dehumanizing tendencies. We run parallel experiments in two samples: A sample of madrassa students aged 18-22 and a comparable sample of students from conventional universities. After collecting responses to a survey, we compare the outcomes across the groups to understand if there are any differences in the attitudes of students coming from different education systems. The study design and survey questionnaire to be used in this study are approved by the Institutional Review Board which is a body that ensures ethical and moral aspects of interacting with human beings.

Despite the popular rhetoric around poverty being the root cause of terrorism and the resulting alliance between the war on terror and the war on poverty, the literature remains divided on this issue. From finding either a positive or a negative association between income and terrorism as well as a lack of any association between the two, the literature now stresses the non-linear association between income and terrorism. The present study begins by theoretically formalizing the nonlinear relationship between income and domestic terrorism by considering the profit maximization of a representative agent. Next, using a novel instrument of natural disasters in related countries to isolate causality, I show that empirical evidence indeed supports a nonlinear relationship between income and terrorism. Further, with the bias-corrected estimates, the concavity of the relationship decreases keeping the impact of income on terrorism decreasing but positive throughout the observable income levels in the sample.

The madrassa conundrum in terrorism studies points to the problem where madrassas - the religious seminaries - are consistently found breeding intolerance and hatred in their students but terrorists do not emerge predominantly from madrassas. The role, if any, played by madrassas in breeding terrorism is thus still not clear. In the present study, I explore how madrassas influence the utility function of potential terrorists. Based on the concept of identity choice introduced by Akerlof and Kranton (2000), I hypothesize that the narrative advanced by madrassas lowers the net costs of identity manifestation for the terrorists by reducing the resistance towards their socially unacceptable violent behavior. In particular, I propose that the role of  madrassas in terrorism is through two channels: Directly, the madrassa network is exploited by the terrorist organizations for recruitment and fund-raising, and indirectly, by madrassas changing the prescriptions of ideal behavior for their students which makes it harder for them to identify and resist extremist tendencies. The study contributes both to a better understanding of the drivers of terrorism and in elaborating the role of identity in the manifestation of violent behavior.